I did admit that the code did not have copyright text and that it was my fault for not doing so. However, if something doesn’t have a copyright statement, it doesn’t mean you can or should use it as your own. Especially if you are using material from a competitor - at the very least it rings of bad taste.

As I stated in my blog entry, if there was not such rampant unethical behaviour with our competitors I probably wouldn’t have been so quick to jump on this. I’m not normally one to go off the handle publicly.

Next time you want to maintain a valid rights claim you may try including a licensing statement such as, “Copyright © 2005, YOURNAME. This content is provided for private educational and evaluation use only. Redistribution in whole or in part or as part of another application commercial or otherwise is strictly prohibited, without the authors expressed written authorization.”

You never placed any restrictions on it therefore you have nothing to complain about. About the only thing you can do now complain, but that doesnt really speak well about your own character.

After posting in FP’s forums I have been informed by their forum Support that the example on their front page was actually a user-contributed example. The example was given to them and they asked permission to post it. Appologies to FlashProjector for misplacing my anger in this regard.

I would like to say that had the example been credited to a user, whether specifically or by indicating that the example(s) is(are) contributed by users, I would have in fact asked FP to remove the example or remove the component from the example.

As it stands I have asked FP to drop in some commented text with my name and site reference. The other choice is to remove the component.

My fault I guess for not having this kind of text in there in the first place, although nothing would have stopped whomever copied the code from just removing the comments. Again, if the examples weren’t displayed with the implication that FP was creating them then I would either not have written this post, or it would have been targetted at someone else, or as a general rant of the issue.

Perhaps a lesson learned for both of us.

Sorry dude. If you need me to whip out the verbal or physical kung fu, I’m here for ya

P.S (’nother example) It was stated recently on the MDM forums that NC had a sole employee … apparently you don’t exist. (On a further note, they had a few people at their booth at FFWD NY a couple of years back)

Not true. The copyright protection of a work starts from the time it was first publicly published. Posting on a forum amounts to publishing, and is definitely protected by copyright.

One option is when you post to a forum, include in your standard footer the appropriate Creative Commons badge to represent how you intend to protect your work. The badge makes it clear what others can and can not do with the material. The badge can be obtained by going to http://creativecommons.org/license/ and specifying what protections that you wish to allow your code.

However, mProjector had EXACT text from our affiliates page for quite some time. Once we posted about the copying, their affiliates page mysteriously disappeared. Although, you can take a look at the WayBackMachine for evidence of their affiliates page text and our affiliates page text. What you need to do is look at the sites going back to 2004, then keep going back to see that our page was there first. They even left the wording in about using Order1, which we used, and they never did. Us (2003) Them (2004)

Jugglor was also guilty of using text from our site, but at least they made it just different enough to be questionable.

I guess the problem is that each of these companies is in the same line of business, so to say they just happened to use the same text is just being naive. Some text will be similar or even the same of course seeing as how we are using similar technologies. But, unfortunately, that’s not what I’m talking about here.

I also don’t want to make the impression that everyone is copying from us and that no one else is capable of doing anything original. It’s just sad when blatent copying occurs because someone doesn’t make the effort.

As for my code and FP, I’m not going to sue anyone or kick and fuss beyond this blog. I don’t want to waste anymore time on this.